Developing the Disciplines in your Walk (part VII)

September 26, 2007 1:05 pm admin Blogs

In this final week on Spiritual Disciplines, we look at WORSHIP.

Discipline means creating regular thought patterns and life practices you regularly live out on a daily basis. To be disciplined is to be Christian. Without discipline a person’s life will lapse into a vague spirituality which merely follows the whim of emotion and ends up creating a very piecemeal character, run rampad with sin, and going nowhere.

John 4:24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Worship is about who we are as human beings, who our god is, and how that effects our lives. As human beings we cannot but be worshippers. We are people who adore things. Everyone worships. To worship is to cherish and enjoy something or someone. We worship sports teams, bands, our husband, wife or kids, food, the ocean and all sorts of beautiful things. They are the things we spend our money and heart on. Everyone worships.

Yet there is a great difference in who we worship. The call in the Bible is to do everything for the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31). That means human beings are made and intended to do everything as worship of God. Our lives are intended to be an array of sorted worship to our divine Lord. Thus there are no mundane things. There are only things done out of a heart and mind of love and worship of God and things which are not. And when they are not we are not worshipping the true God.

There are all different kinds or ways of worshipping God. It has been a long time frustration of mine in Christian circles when the musical aspect of corporate singing in church is called “worship.” It isn’t when we do that it isn’t worship, but everything else is also worship. Too often there is a certain feeling which can be experienced in a group singing songs to our God together, which gets equated as “worship.” That feeling isn’t what makes it worship. You can feel that at a concert of your favorite band when everyone is singing along at the top of their lungs. They may be drunk but feeling is not unsimilar.

What makes something worship is whether it glorifies God. And what glorifies God is thinking, feeling, and acting in light of who he is and what he has done. Life is supposed to be a continual outpouring of worship to God, where everything we do is soaked with an attitude or worship. It becomes the drive and the heart behind everything. As I type on my computer, I am doing it out of a life of worship. As I eat my breakfast I am thinking of God as my provider and his nourishment. As I walk down the street and enjoy the sun and the crisp air I recognize that I walk in God’s world and I am his.

And then there are our spiritual disciplines…different forms of worship, where we take time and a committ to seeking out our God to know him and grow up into his Son Jesus. So we daily do things like read the Bible and pray and on one day we set aside all our normal way of worship to worship in a different way, with God’s people. So we go to church and our conversations are worship, our song is worship, our study of God’s word is worship, our taking communion is worship. It is all worship and what makes it worship is if it is true about God, if our hearts our effected in response, and we then make decisions and act in light of it.

So let us worship God. Have no other gods in your worship. But wash all your activities in worship of his name and on Sunday let us come together to join in a glorious partaking of our great God and savior, Jesus Christ.

- Pastor Duane